


Stones in the River

by cerebel



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:38:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebel/pseuds/cerebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And sometimes people are strong enough to survive what the world throws at them. Sometimes, they find a way to be okay. Five years later AU, TJ POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stones in the River

Five Years Gone (The Arrival of Rush)

The sky splits open, it seems, with the noise. A low, crackling hum that vibrates through wind and earth. TJ is in her cabin, when it happens. Not an earthquake; she remembers what earthquakes felt like, from when the tree-bison used to come through here, every few months, on their migratory pattern. This is something very, very different.

She drops the sewing she’s working on, immediately, and pushes open the door, blinking in the bright sunlight outside. A hand up to shield her face, and that’s when the ship _screams_ past, overhead, skimming over the rough cluster of cottages, over the neat, well-tended lines of the fields, lowering in the rough, open amphitheatre on the other side. 

She’s running before she realizes it, towards the ship, and she turns back a head to shout an order or two. “Riley! Matt!”

“I’m on it!” calls Riley, back. 

Matt doesn’t yell back, but he must’ve been in the house he shares with Chloe and their children. It’s Sunday, it’s the rest day, and there’s no reason he should be out working or hunting. 

By the time TJ gets to the ship, it’s hovering ten or fifteen feet off the ground, and she tries to catch her breath, bracing a hand on her knee.

“I’m here,” says Matt, next to her, fitting one of the guns to his shoulder. They only work about half the time – five years, and they still haven’t quite gotten ammunition presses right – aiming it at the bright-white doorway in the ship.

“Don’t aim it,” she warns him. Won’t do any good to show any hostile intentions, yet –

And then a doorway opens, in the bottom of the ship. Unfolding, in a smooth series of metallic _snick_ s. 

TJ holds up a hand, indicating that people should stay back, and she approaches, cautiously – they’re all thinking the same thing she is, that this might be their way out, what if this could get them back to the Destiny, what if they could have another chance…

And something falls out of the bottom of the ship. 

TJ registers that it’s a person, somewhere in mid-fall, but darts forward too slow to soften the landing. Definitely a human, landing hard, collapsing, curling on the ground. Greyish hair, a body shape that seems familiar, somehow.

“It’s leaving!” says someone, but TJ isn’t paying attention to the ship, rapidly retreating in the sky. She touches the man’s shoulder, gently but firmly pulling him to his back.

He jerks away, scrambling against the ground, fingers digging into loose soil and rock, sounds that, to TJ’s ears, are whimpers of fear. 

“Easy,” she says, lowly. “Easy. It’s all right.” And she reaches out to pull at his shoulder, one more time, slower, this time. 

He lets her pull him onto his back, dark eyes searching hers.

And she inhales, sharp, in shock. 

“Dr. Rush,” says Matt, behind her. 

“We need to get him back to the village,” says TJ. “He needs some medical attention.” 

The people around her are frozen.

“A stretcher!” she snaps, her voice tight with authority. “Now!” 

~*~

He relents to the stretcher without comment. Without a single word, eyes squeezed shut tight, arms curled over his chest. His hand periodically brushing at his temple, as though he expects something to be there, though TJ can’t tell if its absence is reassuring or worrying. 

She walks by his side, all the way back, ignoring the murmuring around her. The people who live on Endor spread rumors. They did that on Icarus, on the ship, and they do it now. When she knows something for sure, she’ll come out and tell them, and they trust her to do that. It’s the way it works. 

It’s the way it’s worked ever since Young disappeared. 

~*~

When they’re back in the cabin, TJ opens the skylight, to get a little natural light in the room. She has them shift Rush onto the spare bed (they still use this cabin as a kind of medical wing), and then she dismisses them. 

It’s the right move, too. As soon as there are fewer people in the room, Rush gets noticeably less curled up. When she approaches, he’s trembling. 

“Dr. Rush?” she questions, sliding her hand into his. “It’s me. It’s Tamara Johansen.” 

His eyes flick up to hers, uncomprehending. 

“Do you understand?” 

No response.

“Dr. Rush.” 

He turns away from her, then, searching around the inside of the cabin, like he’s looking for something. The work table, the bed, the shuttered windows, the hearth. Whatever it is, he apparently doesn’t find it. He turns back to her, worried, and she bites her lip.

“I’m going to check you over for injuries,” she says. “Is that all right?” but she’s pretty sure, now, that he can’t understand. Five years without human contact, with aliens – who says he even remembers how to speak English? She has no idea what kind of treatment he might have had to endure. Even by accident, aliens could inflict some horrible torture on a human mind. 

He – he must not have died in a rockslide, after all.

She keeps her movements slow, and he doesn’t try to fight her. First, a check of his temple, where he keeps touching, and, yes, she can see the faint outline of something there. Gentle probing of his skin yields a flinch, a noise that could have been interpreted as ‘no’, but there’s definitely nothing implanted there. Unless it was put in in place of the bone. TJ also doesn’t see any scars from surgery, but that doesn’t mean anything. So, it must have been something on the surface. 

There don’t seem to be any other marks on him. His skin is smooth, perhaps a little unnaturally so. He doesn’t react when she peels the rubbery suit off of him – it’s wet, where it’s in contact with his skin, she notes, though his skin doesn’t seem to be wrinkled from water. 

He stares at the clothes she gives him, for a long few moments, and she wonders, briefly, if she’s going to have to show him how to get dressed. But then he moves, sliding on pants, pulling a shirt over his head, and she’s hit with a quick jolt of relief. Yes, there must still be something of Rush under there, somewhere, buried in trauma and pain. 

~*~

By TJ’s reckoning, it’s the seventh day, first month, fifth year of their settlement on the planet that they’ve come to call Endor.

(By her reckoning. Greer claims it’s the fourth day, Riley claims it’s the eighth. The settlement has, reluctantly, accepted TJ’s count, when it comes to holidays.)

(The official name of the planet is – well, some Greek god or goddess that TJ can’t seem to recall. It was only a few days after they got there that Eli started calling it Endor. Endor was what stuck.) 

~*~

“We think we spotted the alien ship with the telescope,” says Scott, when she leaves the cabin. “Wasn’t much more than a flash of light, as it went to hyperspace. It’s gone.” 

“So they just dropped him off here?” asks TJ.

“Looks like.” 

“Musta gotten everything they wanted from him,” remarks Greer.

~*~

Rush sleeps for almost a day and a half. She checks him, every once in a while, making sure he’s still breathing – what if he fell into a coma? What if he died, so soon after he got here? She’s not sure she could handle that. 

But, no; he’s fine, and after that time he wakes up, blinks. Touches his temple, and then stares at his fingers, as though accusing them of giving him the wrong sensory input.

“It’s gone,” says TJ. 

He looks up at her.

“It’s gone,” she says, touching her temple. “Whatever they put on you is gone.” 

And his eyes stay fixed on her, a hint narrowed, a look she’s seen before. In people who don’t _quite_ speak a language, but still want to understand. 

She reaches forward, and touches his temple. “It’s gone,” she repeats. 

His mouth thins, and he nods. Reaches a hand up, touches fingertips to his chin, then lowers it, sort of waving it outward –

 _Thank you_. It’s the sign language word for ‘thank you’. Does he think _she_ took it off? Removed it? Whatever ‘it’ was? 

“You’re welcome,” she says. 

And that, there, there’s a spark of understanding. Quickly clouded by confusion, incomprehension. Strange – from what she remembers of Rush, his expressions were never this open, or this easy to read. He was mysterious. She didn’t understand him.

Or maybe it’s _she_ that’s changed. Maybe she can read people like she never could before.

~*~

A few minutes later, she emerges, and stops Wray, passing by the cabin. “Is there anyone on the crew who speaks sign language?” she asks. 

~*~

“I have – had – a deaf sister,” explains Riley, as he follows TJ back to the cabin. “I – I didn’t think it would ever be that useful, on this expedition.” 

“He’s not talking,” says TJ, pausing, outside the door. “He gave me this gesture,” and she mimics the ‘thank-you’ gesture. 

“You think he speaks sign language?”

“I have no idea what I think,” she sighs. “It’s worth a try.”

Riley wipes his hands on his pants. Fiddles with his fingers.

“Are you nervous?” she asks.

“One of my boldest memories of Dr. Rush is him throwing me back against a wall,” says Riley. “Yes. Yes, I’m a little nervous.” 

“Don’t be,” she says. “He hasn’t made any move against me. He’s … pretty screwed-up.”

“He was before,” Riley points out. 

“This is more.” 

~*~

Rush stares at Riley, as he enters. Fingers brushing across his lips, like he used to do when he was concentrating. TJ remembers this. Maybe he’s trying to remember. 

“This is Riley,” she says. “Do you remember?” 

He doesn’t look at her.

“Okay,” she sighs, “give it a shot.”

Riley brings his hands up, ready to ‘say’ something – “What do I say?” he asks.

“Introduce yourself?” she suggests, with a shrug.

Riley pauses, and then he makes a few gestures. 

The response is immediate. Rush is on his feet, quickly enough that Riley flinches backwards, knocking over one of the TJ’s chairs. Rush takes Riley, by the elbows, wide-eyed. Gives him a little _push_ , not hard enough to actually shove him.

“He’s saying do it again,” says TJ. “…I think.” 

Riley does so, cautiously. Makes another couple of gestures –

And Rush returns them. Slowly, at first, and then more and more rapidly. 

“Whoa, whoa,” says Riley. “Um, he knows his name, he just spelled it out. He says that the aliens dropped him here, he’s asking where his head is. No, not his head. Something about his temple, I don’t know what that means.”

“He means a device, that was on his temple?”

Another exchange. “Yes,” says Riley. “And now he’s talking about a water pool, something about a ship, I really haven’t done this in a while.”

“Keep at it,” she says, clapping him on the shoulder. 

~*~

“I … have no idea,” says one of the biologists. “There’s no reason he should remember one language and not another. I mean, obviously, there are slightly different parts of the brain for hearing and movement of the mouth and lips. He might not be able to _hear_ you properly – could be temporal lobe damage?” 

“He can hear fine,” says TJ. And it’s true – he reacts to loud noises –

“I don’t mean his _hearing_ hearing,” says the biologist. “I mean the way his brain understands and interprets it.” 

“You’re saying that,” and TJ tries to understand, “speech, speaking out loud, utilizes some parts of the brain that sign language doesn’t.”

“Maybe,” says the biologist. “I really, really don’t know. I took neuroscience a long time ago, and it was only one class.” 

~*~

One evening, she checks his head again. The marks of the device, whatever it was, have finally started to fade. 

His hand lingers on her waist, and he leans forward, rests his head against her shoulder. 

“It’s all right,” she murmurs, sliding down onto the bed, next to him. “It’s all right.” 

He shakes, and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s crying, into her shirt. Exhausted, pained tears. 

“It’s all right.” She doesn’t have anything else to say. She can’t think of any other words. 

His hand fists in her shirt, and he just holds on, for a while. 

~*~

“Young?” 

It’s his first word. Breathed, softly, in the early hours, before he’s really awake. Just watching her. 

And it shocks her, for a moment. People don’t usually dare to mention Young’s name, anymore. Not for any particular _reason_ , just…

“He’s gone,” she says, shortly.

One Week Gone (Settlement)

Rush is gone.

Dead, presumably. The stargate closed behind him. The ship went to FTL. If there’s any hope, it lies with the ship that they found, down on that planet. 

Insane odds. No one believes he’s going to make it. 

~*~

Slowly, Young’s injuries heal. TJ keeps an eye on them, fingers brushing cursory and cool over his skin. As ever, it’s too familiar, they’re too close, but Young seems able to ignore it, so TJ does too. 

~*~

“Realistically?” asks Riley. “We can’t break the code without Rush.”

“So we’re going to, what, be on the ship forever?” asks another scientist.

Riley shrugs, and makes no response. 

~*~

The planet is habitable. 

Long-term. The vegetation is good. The water is clean. Things are edible. It looks too good to be true. Five hours left until the ship goes back into FTL, and there’s a meeting, in the gate room.

TJ stays off, near the back. She doesn’t know how she feels. Not that awful dread-sinking feeling that she felt the last time they went to settle on a planet, shuttle cruising away from the _Destiny_ , _Destiny_ cruising into the sun. That was a sick horror at the life in front of seventeen survivors. Way too few.

This is different. 

“What are the _risks_?” asks Wray. “What are we giving up to go to that planet?” 

“We’re giving up this ship,” calls someone, and Young holds up a hand.

TJ shifts her eyes to him. Familiar posture, familiar calm, and she can only guess at what he’s feeling. 

“Eli?” asks Young.

“Look, I’m sorry,” says Eli, “but without Dr. Rush here, we’re not going to make it very far. I’m not him!” 

There’s a chorus of objection from the various scientists on board, but – 

But TJ’s eyes are on Young. Like always, she’s always watching him, she doesn’t even know why, anymore, but she’s always watching him. And because she’s watching him, she sees the little flicker across his face, some emotion that he’s trying to hide. 

She doesn’t recognize it. She thought, at one time, that she recognized all of Young’s emotions, but she doesn’t recognize this one. 

“Take it to a vote.” 

“No,” says Young.

The room goes quiet. 

“I’ll put it this way,” says Young. “The people who want to go, go. The people who want to stay, stay.”

A typically _him_ kind of solution, TJ thinks. If there was a vote, anyone who voted in the minority could blame their situation on the majority. This way, everyone who’s on the planet chose to be there. It makes sense to her.

It’s unanimous; everyone leaves. No one stays. 

~*~

Work starts immediately, on the planet. 

Cut down the trees to build walls, lean-tos; to everyone’s surprise, it turns out that Riley actually has a fair amount of construction experience, and TJ watches as Young gently but surely shifts Riley into a supervisory position, before anyone even realize they’re taking orders. 

Scientists, biologists, all sent out to gather samples of the wildlife. They have limited materials for testing food viability, and there’s no real reason that the food is going to be even all that nutritious to humans (as one of them explains to TJ), but they have to try. 

There’s always a next step, always something more to do. And there’s always Young, there, giving the next order, directing as calmly as ever. 

~*~

TJ volunteers for an exploration party the next day, and, before they leave, Young’s hand curls around her shoulder, with a murmured, “One moment, Lieutenant.”

In private, in a nearby copse of trees, Young tells her she can’t go with the exploratory team.

“Exploration is high-risk,” he explains. “If anyone turns up dead, I don’t want it to be you.”

Her eyes narrow, her mind flipping through the possibilities. He doesn’t want her to come to harm, this is some chauvinistic kind of protection, he still has feelings for her, he doesn’t think she can handle herself –

“We need a medic,” says Young, frankly. “Without one, I’m not sure how long we can survive.”

She pauses, then, “All right, sir.” 

Her guesses might still be true. Young still might be protecting her. But the way he does it, the clever, clever way he does it, makes staying back in camp the right thing to do.

~*~

She snaps awake the next morning with the ground rumbling beneath her. Low roll of thunder that she can feel in her bones. 

All around her, people are getting up. Moving to their feet. She hears the crash of things falling, breaking against the cavern floor. Rushes out of the cavern to find that the half-built buildings, below, are being trampled, destroyed under a herd of creatures fast and blurred like the flow of a river. 

She watches, stunned – they all do – until the creatures clear away, the thin, tan tail of their herd slithering into the distance as the trembling of the ground slowly stills.

“Help! Somebody help!” 

There are injuries. TJ gets to work. 

~*~

The sudden destruction of even the paltry few days of work is enough to throw the camp into a kind of stunned despair. Shock at everything they’ve tried, everything they’ve lost. 

Young doesn’t know what to do, at first. TJ can tell. He hesitates, and watches, and bides his time.

And then he takes the communications stones, and starts walking. 

A quarter-mile from the caverns, over the churning rapids of the nearby river delta, he turns back to the ragged group that followed him out here (why did they follow? Well, because he led.) and he looks at them, for a long moment, and then he turns back and, with all of his strength, _throws_ one of the stones out into the river.

A hush spreads across the group, but no one moves to stop him. 

Then the second stone, the third, the fourth, the fifth. Finally, the base, splintering and cracking on the rocks below. 

Camille Wray stumbles up to the ledge, and it seems to TJ that Wray’s grief, written warm across her face, is everything they’re feeling. That Wray collapsing to the ground is the weight of everyone’s hopes and dreams breaking, splintering into jagged, painful pieces –

Young, without a word, crouches down by Wray and pulls her into his arms, muffling her grief in the curve of his shoulder. 

\- and Young, Young is the strong, solid weight that holds them all together. 

TJ watches from a distance. She wipes off a few tears of her own, and she turns away, and she goes back to the camp.

~*~

They rebuild:

“It’s no wonder there are so many paths around,” says Scott. “Must be on some kinda herd migration path.”

“We’ll be ready for it, next time,” says Young. 

The new buildings are constructed on rockier ground. Out of the smoother land. Out of the path of the herd. 

~*~

They find food: 

Turns out that most of the plants on the planet with any real nutritional value are also slightly poisonous, some kind of they have in common. Then it turns out that a particular berry, low-growing and fairly bitter and awful to the taste, is a passable antidote. 

From there on out, the side-berry is served with every meal. 

~*~

They live: 

There are campfires, and sometimes songs, and sometimes just faces drawn in darkness and orange flickering light and silence and the soft crackling of burning logs. 

They’re in this together. 

~*~

Greer, incongruously, invents tea, from one of the scrub bushes growing around the camp. It quickly becomes the beverage of choice. Caffeinated, even, or something that feels a lot like caffeine. 

The food supplies are gone. They’re living entirely from the planet, now. 

Life has settled into a rhythm. An empty, pointless rhythm, for those who’ve started to succumb to despair. A gentle, easy rhythm for those who’ve decided to live. 

TJ thinks that some people are even grateful for the quiet.

~*~

She realizes, gradually, a few weeks in, that she doesn’t know where Young sleeps. That he’s always awake when there’s some crisis (broken leg, food poisoning, an attack by one of the planet’s very few predator creatures). 

TJ knows where most everyone else sleeps. The main cavern, the collective room, the few side-rooms. 

So -- She stumbles on where Young sleeps by accident. A fissure, a narrow passageway off of the rest of the cave. He hasn’t bothered to build a shelter for himself.

Furtive, cautious, she slips inside. 

The room is wet, cold. There’s a bright crack where the outside world has started to wear its way in. Neatly folded blanket on the floor, a simple stack of spare clothes. 

It’s impulse that makes her crouch down, smooth the wrinkles out of the blanket. Something else that makes her lift up the stack of clothes, search for something, for _anything_ that means a real person lives here. That Young still has a heart, has a soul.

There’s nothing. 

~*~

There’s no way for her to tell the story of the days that follow. Slow rhythms that fade into a ceaseless beat. 

She challenges him, eventually.

“You should talk to me,” she says. “You lost someone under your command. I know how that affects you.” 

He grunts, dismissively, turning away from her. 

“Everett,” she says, softly. 

“Don’t,” he snaps. “Don’t do that.” 

Finally, a hint of anger. A hint of pain. And getting that, getting a reaction out of him, isn’t as satisfying as TJ is expecting. She can’t think of any way to follow it up. Any way to draw the emotions out of him and then let him get better.

“I get it,” she tells him, finally. 

He raises an eyebrow, at her. “Get what?”

“If you don’t care about the people you lose,” she says, “then you can’t care about anything.” 

Next she knows, she’s shoved back against the cave wall, a rare fury in Young’s eyes. A fury he understands even less than her, she thinks, and she doesn’t stop to consider her actions. Just presses her mouth against his, changes the potential violence, morphs it until it’s on her terms. 

He kisses back, hungry, desperate.

And, in the past, it’s always been him in control. On top, too, usually. Him guiding the twists and turns of the relationship. TJ just along for the ride, along for the adventure, caught up in him (and loving him?) and loving her life. This time, she’s not surprised to find out that she’s the one in control. That she’s the one that moves, and he responds, that when he’s inside her, it’s him that’s trembling, it’s him that moans into her skin (he didn’t make much noise, before, he was never all that noisy during sex), and it’s him that comes first, shaking and shivering with need. 

~*~

The sex doesn’t _fix_ anything. But it makes it better. It leaves him just barely able to tame the emotions roiling inside him, just barely able to hold it together, and it gives her something to hold on to. 

~*~

Over the stretch of time, it eventually becomes less of an affair and more of a relationship. They share a house. Everyone knows they’re together. He takes her hand, sometimes, in public. No one is particularly surprised, least of all Greer, who seems to have already known. 

They’re careful, by some unspoken agreement, to try and avoid getting her pregnant. There’s at least a week, per month, where they don’t have penetrative sex at all. 

A year in, their measures aren’t enough. TJ doesn’t notice when she’s one day late, but at three she gets a little worried, and at ten it feels like she’s getting suffocated, suffocated by the wind and sky and the endless plains of _Endor_. 

She tells him – but she doesn’t have to tell him, he’s already noticed. A grim nod, and he promises to take care of her, but she fears the distance in him. He was never all hers to begin with. 

..that changes, though. 

It’s like this is a melting point. A change. The idea of a child with her, a family, and he starts to loosen up. Smiles, once or twice. 

She starts to believe, cautiously, that he _could_ be hers. 

Two months later, she wakes up with the blankets blood-soaked between her legs. Two days of pain and fear later, and she wakes up again, the biologist she trained as a medic crying with relief, upon her opening her eyes. 

_Miscarriage._

The word is clinical and foreign in her ears, in her mind. It doesn’t explain the agony, it doesn’t explain how she wakes up in the middle of the night with the pillow wet and her jaw aching (she grinds her teeth in her sleep now, or so Young tells her). It doesn’t explain the raw, aching emptiness inside her. And she doesn’t _understand_. She was never empty before, this loss should just return her to how she was –

His lips touch her neck, his hand pulls her closer to him. She closes her eyes, and tries not to think.

Two Years Gone (Whatever Happened to Colonel Young?)

This pass-through of the herd is more devastating than usual. Every three months, the ground shakes, the plains flood with the strange beasts they’ve been calling the tree-bison. Mostly, they keep away from the village, and the fields. But, two years in, the fields are torn up. Trees are leveled. One of the caverns collapses. 

“We can’t stay here,” says Matt. “Not if we keep getting hit like this. We have to move.”

“We’ve built a life here.”

“We don’t want to go.”

Young raises a hand. “We’ll solve this problem. We’re gonna find some way to change their migratory route.” 

~*~

“What do you mean, we’ll change their route?” asks TJ, back in their cabin. 

“If we can get ‘em to take a different path once,” says Young, “then they’ll take it every time, after that.”

“You don’t know that for sure, do you?” 

“It’s a guess.” 

He pulls out an old, worn bag, from under the hand-built bed. 

“You’re going?” she asks.

“I’m gonna fix it,” says Young. 

“You’re going.”

“And don’t you think it’s about time I did?” 

She crosses her arms. Tries to think of something to say.

“I’ll be back.”

She knows a lie when she hears one. But she doesn’t ask him to stay.

Later, that haunts her. 

~*~

He leaves her in charge.

She climbs the hill overlooking the village and, for the first time, feels the weight of responsibility settle into her. Their lives are hers, now. She’s the one that Young trusted to hand them to. 

And, surprisingly, she isn’t afraid. Well, yes, she’s nervous, she is a little afraid, but she’s – confident. Ready. 

She’s strong enough to do this.

~*~

The herd never comes back. Every three months, if she squints, TJ can see a distant cloud of dust, along the edge of the plain.

~*~

Young never comes back, either.

Five Years, Three Months Gone (Finding)

“I know that look,” says TJ, softly, stepping up next to Rush, on the hilltop.

“Excuse me?” asks Rush. His voice still rasps, a little, to TJ’s ears. Unfamiliar, somehow. 

“I know that look,” she says, again. She bites her lip, and settles her hands on her hips. “Make sure you take enough supplies for a couple of weeks, at least. We can’t spare a gun, but you can probably take a few knives and a few traps. It should be enough to get you by.”

“What do you mean?” 

“You’re going after him, aren’t you?” asks TJ.

Rush’s fingertips skim up the underside of his chin, and his eyes shift out, unfocused in the distance.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I suppose I am.” 

~*~

He leaves at sunrise. Slow, red light playing pink across the clouds, dim and grey when it gets to Rush and TJ, outside the door to her cabin.

He pulls the bag on his back. “I’ll be back,” he says.

She smiles. “I’ve heard that before.” And she leans forward, and presses a kiss to his cheek.

When she pulls back, his eyes are closed, head part-bowed. 

“I believe he’s still alive,” says Rush.

“Me too,” says TJ. 

“I’ll bring him back with me.”

“We’ll see.” 

He touches the spot on his cheek, where she kissed him. A nod, and then he’s on his way. She watches for a long time, as the light turns from grey to yellow, and as the village wakes up around her. 

~*~

One morning, months later, she reclines back, in the rocking-chair outside her front door. Holds a cup of tea in her hands, steam curling lazily into the air. 

Next door, Chloe’s second child bakes little mud beads in the sunlight.

In the field below, Matt wipes the sweat from his brow, nudges Greer with his elbow at a joke of Eli’s. She can hear them laughing, from all the way up here. 

There’s a warm, sweet smell, from Wray’s house. The rippling, windy sound of cloth fluttering, drying on a line. The touch of the sun on her skin.

TJ takes a sip of the tea, and she smiles.

~*~

Months later, in the growing dark of evening, she looks out over the ordinarily empty plains. But today, in the distance, there’s a slow curling of smoke up towards the sky, and, almost too far to see, the bright, twinkling light of a campfire.


End file.
